Jurassic Park

Image credit: Daily Mail

So this week on the couch I decided to test the waters of the sci-fi disaster novel, a subgenre I have never shown any interest in before, and I have to say that it’s been a very exciting week! The book: Jurassic Park.

This book tells the exciting story of eccentric elderly millionaire John Hammond who puts a ton of money into biogenetics in the hope of using it to clone dinosaur DNA and create the world’s first dinosaur amusement park. But the park has run into a few difficulties and delays, which has inspired Hammond to bring along various experts to check out the park and give it the ok. The experts include palaeontologist Alan Grant, palaeobotanist Ellie Sattler, theoretic mathematician Ian Malcolm, and investment lawyer Donald Gennaro as well as Hammond’s own two grandkids. The weekend starts out completely fine until a shady heist is pulled off by a disgruntled engineer and the park loses all power and communications, turning the fun safari adventure into a horrific nightmare when the park's gigantic and predatory exhibits run amok.

While it’s taken me many years to come around on the film Jurassic Park, I have to say that I absolutely loved the book upon first reading! Crichton writes with this wonderful down-to-earth tone that doesn’t make the book feel like higher science fiction, but rather a thrilling, action-packed monster story. The science, while being a little farfetched in its purposes for the story, has the feeling of being thoroughly researched and then translated into a language that’s accessible and digestible for the readers.

Like a true sci-fi novel, Jurassic Park explores the themes of the power of man and what it actually means in terms of controlling our environments and destinies. The central conflict between characters stems from contrasting moral and ethical ideas: ultimately science vs. nature. What’s particularly refreshing and good about Crichton’s novel is that its characters come right out and say what side of the science vs. nature spectrum they sit on and there is no villainous motive of insanity, bloodlust, or elaborate revenge at work, simply the normal, everyday human flaws of ambition, greed, and materialism. This is what makes the characters so easy to form emotional attachments to and you get a delicious sense of satisfaction when your favourites escape while your un-favourites get poisoned or ripped open. There’s a lot of emotional payoff happening in this book, which is why I loved it so much.

Image credit: The New York Times

Crichton’s simple and straightforward prose is another thing that makes the reading experience of Jurassic Park so great. There are no long and laborious bouts of exposition and the scientific jargon is kept to a bearable medium while the rest of the adventure is craftily depicted through dialogue and exciting, descriptive paragraphs of action and suspense. The shifting perspectives of the characters and their opinions of the events and other characters works wonderfully to influence the reader’s own opinions and attachments, which has the effect of completely immersing them in the world of the book and creating the exciting reading experience that Jurassic Park is.

Jurassic Park was written by Michael Crichton and published in 1991 by the Random Century Group. However, the story is probably best known as the blockbuster film made in (1993) starring Sam Neil and Jeff Goldblum.